The Completion of All Things

Mat 5:18 "Truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no way pass from the law, until all is fulfilled."

I have been waiting for an opportunity to explain Christ's concept of "heaven and earth" in more detail. I have discussed this before in my initial post on the Lord's Prayer and my discussion of the kingdom of heaven, but there is more that must be said.

As we said earlier, light is Christ's metaphor for knowledge, however, in a larger sense, the term for earth (ge in Greek) used here also encapsulates the known part of our universe. Ge is the dirt we farm, our nations, the natural world, and human society. It is the same term used in "salt of the earth." However, it is a very different from the term use in "light of the world," which if you remember, was kosmos, a term which includes the aspects of both heaven and earth.

If ge is the known and natural, heaven, ouranos, is the part of the universe we cannot know. It is the unknown and unknowable part of God's domain. It is the mystery of the universe, the kosmos. This is true whether we are speaking of the physical heavens (the stars and galaxies) or the dimensions of nature that we cannot perceive. As our science has moved forward, we have learned much about the physical universe, but everything we have learned has deepened the mystery of nature, not resolved it.

So what is Christ saying here, that the law (nomos, discussed here) will not change at all until both what we know today and what we don't know today will pass away. This is very interesting because it predicts a time when we will be united with God (our father in heaven, that is, our father in mystery) in such a way that all mysteries will be revealed to us.

This is important because the word used for "all" here does not mean "all of the law." The Greek word used is pas, which specifically means each and every person and all things. And the word used for fulfilled is not pleroo, the term used in when Christ says he is here to fulfill the law, which mean to "fill up". The word translated here as "fulfill" is ginomai, which means "to become," "to be made", or "to be completed." So what Christ is saying specifically is the "all people (and all things) will become complete" and the end of time when the known, unknown, and the law all come to an end.

So in this line, Christ is giving us a glimpse of the destiny of the universe. The separation between heaven and earth, mystery and natural, will be erased. We and nature will become complete and no longer need any laws, but until then, we need every bit of law, especially in the sense of tradition, history, and divine guidance from scripture.